Before we kill all the lawyers, shouldn't we start with the philosophers? Or at least the philosophy students? Or maybe just students? I stopped watching the Derrida video 5 seconds into the first wo/man's question because I could see another fifteen seconds of preening coming.

3: If you're going to make a "serious inquiry" into moral responsibility regarding apartheid, at least take both sides into account. What of the extraordinary burdens placed on the whites keeping black people down? It was easier in this country, where whites were a majority. Much harder in South Africa. The stress associated with doing so can lead to really unsightly skin blemishes among the ruling class. As you can see, no doubt, if you look closely at the video.

I don't seem to be able to find any Quine on YouTube. A professor I had as an undergraduate showed us rather a lot of Quine videos. There was one in which he was asked about all sorts of personal preferences, and he expressed a strong dislike of canned tuna.

popular music (which is inescapably commodified) in the attempt at political protest ends up making appalling things (Vietnam) consumable.

What I've never understood about Adorno is the idea that some kind of art magically gets to resist commodification, when right there in statements like that you see him himself expressing something undifferentiatable from the consumables-snobbery of someone who thinks eating bad cheese is a moral failing. (Also who he imagines looking at, reading, or listening to his ideal forms of art—but then wiser heads than I have told me just to imagine Adorno as a pair of disapproving jowls.)

Blume's synopsis is correct. Adorno accuses protest singers of extracting something marketable from horrors, by using "sentimental" music to make the stomach-turning subject matter into something palatable.